Apple Confirms Acquisition of Israeli Flash Memory Firm Anobit [Updated]
Bloomberg reports that Apple has confirmed last month's news from Israel that the company had acquired flash memory firm Anobit. The confirmation came in the form of Apple's standard boilerplate statement used in addressing acquisitions, and did not include details on the purchase or Apple's plans for the company.
Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, said today that the purchase had been made, while declining to elaborate. The statement confirmed a December report from in the Israeli newspaper Cacalist.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” Dowling said in a telephone interview.
Apple reportedly paid $400-500 million for Anobit, but neither Apple nor Anobit has confirmed the purchase price.
The report notes that Anobit is currently responsible for a key flash memory controller for the iPad and iPhone, and Apple likely opted to bring the company's expertise in house in order to draw more heavily on the Anobit's expertise, increase efficiencies, and exert greater control over a component important to the functionality of iOS devices.
Update: Bloomberg reports that Apple paid about $390 million for Anobit in a deal that was not finalized until January 6.
Apple Inc. (AAPL) acquired Anobit Technologies Ltd. for about $390 million, paying below the price sought by the Israeli maker of a flash-memory drive part for the iPhone, people familiar with the purchase said.
Negotiations continued for more than two weeks after Israel’s Calcalist newspaper reported Dec. 20 that Apple bought Herzliya-based Anobit for as much as $500 million. Apple finally signed the agreement Jan. 6 to buy the Israeli company, according to two Anobit shareholders, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Apple didn’t want details disclosed.
Popular Stories
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
Top Rated Comments
Good move Apple.
If I'm not mistaken, only the RAM is soldered to the motherboard on the current MBA and the SSD is still user replaceable.
You are missing something. What counts isn't how cheap the labour is in Israel, but how good their universities are.
You are being naive. Anobit does not make flash and neither does Apple. Merge two companies not making flash memory and you get what? No flash memory. You need FABs for that and only Samsung has those (and spending $5..10 billion dollars annually to update those). Spending $500 million these days just buys you some patents and that's what this purchase is.
----------
Actually, Microsoft didn't buy Office.